U.N. Court Convicts Two Croatian Generals of War Crimes and Frees a Third

PARIS — In a shock to Croatia over its conduct of Balkan warfare in the 1990s, a United Nations court on Friday found a Croatian general, Ante Gotovina, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in a campaign he led to regain Croatian land and drive Serbs out of the Krajina region in 1995.

General Gotovina, who was arrested in the Canary Islands in 2005 after four years on the run, was sentenced to 24 years in prison because troops under his command shelled towns, looted, killed and persecuted civilians.

The court sentenced Mladen Markac, another general in the campaign, to 18 years, but acquitted a third, Ivan Cermak, of all charges and ordered his release.

The decisions by a three-judge panel of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague were in effect an indirect verdict on the late president of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, who died in 1999 as prosecutors at The Hague were planning to have him indicted. The court said Mr. Tudjman was the leader of a “joint criminal enterprise” to drive Serbs from Krajina, a hilly region they had long inhabited in central and southern Croatia, and to repopulate the area with Croats only. In 1991 Serbian rebels, backed by Belgrade, broke away and created a separate statelet there.

During and after the operation to drive Serbian military and police forces from Krajina, about 300 civilians were killed, many in their homes, and some 90,000 Serbs fled Croatia. Thousands of their abandoned homes were looted and burned.

The campaign was planned by Mr. Tudjman and Croatian commanders, who have said they were helped by active and retired American military personnel.

The presiding judge, Alphons Orie of the Netherlands, said the case was not about earlier crimes in the region, nor about the Croat forces’ resorting to warfare. “This case was about whether Serb civilians in the Krajina were the targets of crimes and whether the accused should be held criminally liable,” he said.

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The verdicts of three Croatian generals accused of war crimes were shown on a large screen on a street in Zagreb, drawing an emotional response from the crowd.Credit
Antonio Bat/European Pressphoto Agency

In the center of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where several thousand people watched the court session on a giant screen, many jeered the verdicts. The campaign to retake Krajina was widely seen in Croatia as a just military victory and a powerful affirmation of the country’s identity. The three generals have been treated as heroes, with the government paying their legal bills and providing experts and documents to support their case.

At the same time, the government was slow to turn over material to prosecutors, and as Judge Orie noted, some documents “were never provided.”

Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor of Croatia called the verdicts “unacceptable” and said the government would try to overturn it.

General Gotovina’s lawyer, Greg W. Kehoe, said by telephone from The Hague, “I am absolutely shocked — it is contrary to the facts and wrong in law.”

The finding that Croatian forces indiscriminately shelled civilians “flies in the face of reality, and no witness testified to that,” Mr. Kehoe said. He said that when Knin, Krajina’s main town, was shelled, for example, only one person was killed, and the other deaths in the area were the result of private revenge after the campaign.

Mr. Kehoe, a veteran American lawyer who was the top American adviser at the Iraqi Special Tribunal in Baghdad, said that the operation was carried out “according to accepted military principles, in accordance with NATO doctrine.”

He said he would appeal the verdict. General Gotovina, 55, has a résumé with multiple adventures that include serving in the French Foreign Legion and training right-wing paramilitaries in Latin America.

The question of what role the United States played during the Krajina campaign has remained a matter of intense intrigue in Croatia and Serbia.

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Gen. Ante Gotovina, center, talked to his lawyers on Friday at The Hague, where he was sentenced to 24 years in prison.Credit
Pool photo by Jerry Lampen

Over four days in August 1995, the Croatian Army swiftly took Krajina, about one-third of Croatia, from the Serbian forces that had occupied it for four years. The Serbs put up little resistance, instead withdrawing their armor and calling on Serbian civilians to leave. Once Krajina was secured, General Gotovina’s forces linked up with Bosnian Croat forces and rolled over Serbian units deep inside Bosnia, where a few weeks earlier Bosnian Serbs had outraged the world by overrunning the United Nations safe haven in Srebrenica and massacring thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

The defeats in Krajina and Bosnia, among the first suffered by Serbian forces, combined with NATO bombing to bring Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Serbia, to the negotiating table, resulting eventually in the Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian war.

Croatian officials have said that United States military advisers and a Virginia-based contractor, Military Professional Resources, trained Croatian forces and assisted in planning, and that American drone aircraft supplied intelligence about Serbian movements.

The trial revealed no new details about those assertions, and lawyers on both sides said the issue was not relevant to the case of the three generals.

The United States is not implicated in any of the criminal charges related to the operation. But lawyers following the proceedings said American intelligence information could or should have warned Croatian forces if war crimes were being committed.

Lawyers close to the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Croatian officials claim privately that the C.I.A. and Pentagon helped plan the operation. Lt. Col. Richard C. Herrick, who was the American military attaché in Zagreb at the time, testified for the defense at the trial, saying that American training for Croatian forces involved teaching the laws of war. Colonel Herrick said he knew little about the consequences of the operation because he was recalled two days before it began.

On Friday in Zagreb, President Ivo Josipovic of Croatia said he was particularly disturbed by the judges’ ruling that the Krajina campaign was a “joint criminal enterprise” that included the country’s top leadership. “It is a serious political and judicial act that has shocked even me,” Mr. Josipovic said of the verdicts. “We are aware crimes were committed, but I am convinced that there was no joint criminal enterprise in the defense of Croatia.”

Summarizing their ruling, the judges said the people who planned the operation “shared the common objective of the permanent removal of the Serbian civilian population from Krajina by force or threat of force, which amounted to deportation, forcible transfer and persecution.”

The judges ruled that General Gotovina was part of the criminal enterprise, along with Mr. Tudjman; his defense minister, Gojko Susak; and the Croatian Army chief of staff, Janko Bobetko; all three of them are now dead.

A version of this article appears in print on April 16, 2011, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: U.N. Court Convicts Two Croatian Generals of War Crimes and Frees a Third. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe